According to Sudeep Bharati, director, developer tools for Microsoft India’s Visual Studio Team, the company is working with manufacturers to come up with lower-end phones for the Indian market.
‘Windows Phone 7’ is Microsoft’s upcoming mobile operating system and series of phones that Microsoft hopes will revive its presence in the mobile market, which is dominated by Apple and BlackBerry in the US and by Nokia in developing countries. In India, this means generating phones that offer a cost-advantage to the competitively priced Nokia phones.
“We are working on phones with 2 chassis, one with a screen resolution of 800*480 and the other with a lower resolution of 480*320. Phones with chassis 1 will be available by the end of 2010,” says Bharati.
The lower-end models will have at least 128 MB RAM, a lower-end processor and a 5 megapixel camera, unlike the higher-end models that need to have 1Ghz CPU GPS chip and 1GB of RAM.
The company is still in talks with hardware manufacturers on the feasibility of the plan and the pricing of these phones.
The higher-end models are expected to be priced similar to the Nexus One, which is available for $529 in the US. It is expected that the lower-end phones would be priced lower than Rs20,000.
Google too had earlier mentioned plans to release a stripped- down version of Nexus One in India this year.
Microsoft has laid special emphasis on the graphical component of the phone as games will come with Xbox Live support, which will allow users to play a game on their mobile, save it, continue the same game on their PCs and finish it on their Xbox 360.
Bharati also said that he’s expecting developers to release Live games which can be played on all three platforms as a package.
The tools that developers can use to make these games – Visual Studio 2010, Expression Blend – were developed under him at the Hyderabad centre of Microsoft. “Developers can make their games compatible for all the platforms using the same code. They don’t have to write separate applications for each platform. Also, games can be written for the phone using Silverlight as well,” he added.
Silverlight, Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe’s Flash, has seen a lot of developments with version 4 to be released later this year. At Microsoft Tech Ed, which was organised in Bangalore last week, a few of the developers demonstrated a way to make a fully interactive 3D object using Silverlight. The 3D capabilities of Silverlight will come in handy when developing games as well.
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